Particular business operations require numerous applications to perform the various functions of the business (or a particular aspect of the business). A problem arises in such circumstances since all of these various applications need to be controlled and handled, with each application potentially having its own way of handling operation and “bookkeeping” mechanisms (synchronization, multiprocessing, timing) in addition to the associated business tasks. In addition, the various applications may have separate instances each customized for a particular customer of the business. The individual management of these applications leads to a lack of productivity since the business functionality of the applications is intertwined with operating system-dependent tasks in the code of each application. A primary obstacle is the complexity inherent to the operating conditions of the system.
Existing application server technologies, such as Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition (J2EE) and Microsoft's Net, are intended to provide an infrastructure for network-distributed applications that share data across an enterprise. However, neither of these technologies provide a way to control the applications from the infrastructure. Furthermore, neither help to discharge the application programmer from the tasks of the system programmer or offer a unified technique that is not application-related for handling the applications' “bookkeeping” and monitoring requirements.